Regarding the first few lines, I take it to be a description of himself living in poverty, "strumming on a stone again" meaning he was too poor to buy a guitar so he was strumming on a stone. He's at the address of the golden door (the door of the rich and powerful) and is baarely earning an income from the entertainment moguls ("pulling teeth from the pimps of gore") - as someone else suggested, pulling teeth means just barely getting something out, with difficulty, for instance you could say "it's like pulling teeth to get any information out of him". And pimps of gore would be those who profit from the sale of gore to the public.
So in other words, he's a poor starving artist, a bohemian, and he's thinking about how to fix the situation, how to fix society. And he dreams of a utopia where they don't have to pay rent, and "every soul is duty bound" to comply with all these statutes in order to prevent injustices. Where everyone is exactly equal, the Communist dream. But the resulting society is "nothing like we'd ever dreamt / our lust for life had gone away with the rent we hated". And people weren't altruistic and good. "Because it made no money nobody saved no one's life this time." If people can't make a dollar off of it, they're not going to do it. People are motivated by self-interest, and without that incentive, people don't work for the betterment of society. That's "the fatal flaw of the red age" (of Communism).
So that society didn't work out, "so we burned all our uniforms" - like other people have mentioned, people in that society were like penguins, all uniform, all the same. So they burned the uniforms, destroyed that society, "and let nature take its course again / and the big ones just eat all the little ones" which describes unregulated Capitalism, or Hobbes' "state of nature" - where there is no protection against exploitation, and inequality and injustice are rampant. "That sends us back to the drawing board" because that's the original problem they were trying to remedy.
The next part ("In our darkest hours...") is pretty self-explanatory, and it's basically a break from the philosophy for a little emotion. It's good because it depicts the problem with the unregulated (laissez faire) state of nature, the despair it causes, and "all our crying voices / they can't turn it around", no matter much we hurt, all our crying won't change the system.
So he has indicted Communism and Capitalism (or alternatively, legislating/regulating behavior and refraining from doing so) and he concludes the problem is not in the society, but in people. That even though we have all these things, "rules and maps and guns," "we still can't just behave ourselves" and keep from hurting and killing each other. We can't "behave ourselves / even if to save our own lives." And this is where he hits his thesis: "so says I, we are a brutal kind." It's really an indictment of humanity more than of any particular social system.
As others have already noted, "Tell Sir Thomas More we've got another failed attempt" (the spelling should be "More" not "Moore") refers to another failed attempt to create utopia, to fix society's problems. He is indicting people, who will only save someone's life "if it makes them money." It's a bitter, cynical charge, but ultimately, this thought experiment shows, true.
Regarding the first few lines, I take it to be a description of himself living in poverty, "strumming on a stone again" meaning he was too poor to buy a guitar so he was strumming on a stone. He's at the address of the golden door (the door of the rich and powerful) and is baarely earning an income from the entertainment moguls ("pulling teeth from the pimps of gore") - as someone else suggested, pulling teeth means just barely getting something out, with difficulty, for instance you could say "it's like pulling teeth to get any information out of him". And pimps of gore would be those who profit from the sale of gore to the public.
So in other words, he's a poor starving artist, a bohemian, and he's thinking about how to fix the situation, how to fix society. And he dreams of a utopia where they don't have to pay rent, and "every soul is duty bound" to comply with all these statutes in order to prevent injustices. Where everyone is exactly equal, the Communist dream. But the resulting society is "nothing like we'd ever dreamt / our lust for life had gone away with the rent we hated". And people weren't altruistic and good. "Because it made no money nobody saved no one's life this time." If people can't make a dollar off of it, they're not going to do it. People are motivated by self-interest, and without that incentive, people don't work for the betterment of society. That's "the fatal flaw of the red age" (of Communism).
So that society didn't work out, "so we burned all our uniforms" - like other people have mentioned, people in that society were like penguins, all uniform, all the same. So they burned the uniforms, destroyed that society, "and let nature take its course again / and the big ones just eat all the little ones" which describes unregulated Capitalism, or Hobbes' "state of nature" - where there is no protection against exploitation, and inequality and injustice are rampant. "That sends us back to the drawing board" because that's the original problem they were trying to remedy.
The next part ("In our darkest hours...") is pretty self-explanatory, and it's basically a break from the philosophy for a little emotion. It's good because it depicts the problem with the unregulated (laissez faire) state of nature, the despair it causes, and "all our crying voices / they can't turn it around", no matter much we hurt, all our crying won't change the system.
So he has indicted Communism and Capitalism (or alternatively, legislating/regulating behavior and refraining from doing so) and he concludes the problem is not in the society, but in people. That even though we have all these things, "rules and maps and guns," "we still can't just behave ourselves" and keep from hurting and killing each other. We can't "behave ourselves / even if to save our own lives." And this is where he hits his thesis: "so says I, we are a brutal kind." It's really an indictment of humanity more than of any particular social system.
As others have already noted, "Tell Sir Thomas More we've got another failed attempt" (the spelling should be "More" not "Moore") refers to another failed attempt to create utopia, to fix society's problems. He is indicting people, who will only save someone's life "if it makes them money." It's a bitter, cynical charge, but ultimately, this thought experiment shows, true.